Retired officer asks: Did criminal kill his wife as vengeance?

morning of Sept. 5, 2003, when his 74-year-old wife, Lois, was gunned down while sweeping their driveway.

There was little more evidence than the eight bullets found in her body, in the garage door, in his fence and in the side of a neighbor’s home. The gun was never found.

There was seemingly no motive for the morning violence that took the life of a 5-foot-3-inch cancer survivor who occupied much of her time tidying her home.

“She was a Christian lady,” Butler said. “She got along with all her neighbors. We got along fine. We never had any problems. It made no sense at all.”

[photopress:lois.jpg,full,pp_image]

Tom and his wife had recently returned from a trip to the Netherlands for the Holland Tulip Festival. She had six grown children and 11 grandchildren.

Tom and Lois lived in a quaint yellow house on the corner of Linda Lane in the Western Hills neighborhood of

Lois Butler

Adams County.

The Butlers took an occasional trip to Glenwood Springs to bathe in hot springs. Lois Butler donated her time to her congregation, the Crossroads American Baptist Church. The soft-spoken woman loved animals and often contributed money to animal shelters.

That morning Tom said good-bye to Lois while she was sweeping the driveway at about 9 a.m. He drove to a vehicle-repair garage to have a new gasket installed in his pickup truck.

Children had already gone to school at 7700 Delta St. when shots rang out. A neighbor found Lois Butler on river rock, still clutching a broom. The first bullet had struck her in the back. The neighbor called an ambulance.

[photopress:lois2.jpg,full,pp_image]

When Butler returned home, another neighbor told him there had been an accident. His wife was at the hospital.
At the hospital, Tom learned his wife was dead.

Has Tom Butler been amply investigated? With his years as a
detective and gunsmith he has the ability to pull off a crime like this. On
occasion he would make biting condescending remarks directed toward Lois, and
overall it didn’t seem like their marriage was a happy one. Tom came across to
me as callus and critical of the world.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.